Dr. Gerard van den Aardweg excoriated all such surgeries as “harmful mutilation and an act of inhumanity” toward people who have a “serious mental disorder.”

“Politicians and medical professionals, the promoters and executors of these mutilations, have a lot to answer for, towards the transgender patient, society, and their own conscience,” he told LifeSiteNews.

Health Minister Eric Hoskins announced in June that by 2018, Ontario will be the second province to offer genital transitional surgeries, now available only in Quebec and the United States.

“For some trans and gender-diverse people in Ontario, transition-related surgeries are necessary,” Hoskins contended.

“Every person has the right to be who they are.”

The health ministry also reports a staggering seven-fold increase within the last year in the number of people approved for sex-reassignment surgeries.

That’s because in March 2016, the Liberals made good their promise to expand the number of provincial sites that can assess people for the surgeries. Previously, only Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health could do so.

Since then, the number of people approved for some form of gender reassignment surgery has burgeoned from 195 in 2015-2016 to 1,365 in 2016-2017, according to ministry figures.

Ontario has publicly funded gender reassignment surgeries since 2008.

According to the ministry, the province paid out $4.37 million for such surgeries in 2016-2017, more than double the $2.2 million in 2014-2015.

Procedures on track to be provided in-province by 2018 include vaginoplasty (“male-to-female” surgery that constructs a vagina, typically by cutting and flipping the male member so it resembles a vagina) and metoidioplasty (“female-to-male” surgery that constructs a penis using an hormonally enlarged clitoris).

However, according to the ministry, Ontario will not provide phalloplasty, that is, “female-to-male” surgery that constructs a penis by using donor tissue, likely from the patient’s arm or leg.

The author of Homosexuality and Hope, 1985; On the Origins and Treatment of Homosexuality, 1986, and The Battle for Normality, published by Ignatius Press in 2005, he decries such interventions as “harmful mutilation and an act of inhumanity.”

“First, the transgender’s (transsexual’s) urge to be operated upon is an expression of a serious mental disorder,” he told LifeSiteNews in an email.

“Second, the fake-therapy of surgery etc. does nothing except mutilate him/her for life and aggravate his/her mental alienation.”

And third, there’s the cost.

That includes not only money diverted from essential medical services but “immaterial damage done to the public morale when the authorities promote such gravely irresponsible measures,” noted van den Aardweg.

“Pampering pathological perversions of sexuality, gender, and marriage is at the same time destroying people’s healthy ideas and morality about these things, thus a promotion of decadence.”

The Catholic psychologist also skewered Hoskins’ rationale that “everyone has the right to be who they are.”

Such logic could justify the legalization of pedophilia, he observed.

“There is no evidence at all that transsexuals have hereditary or other physical or physiological anomalies,” van den Aardweg noted. “Biologically, they ‘are’ normal boys and girls, men and women.”

So from the Liberals’ point of view, “‘who they are’ is actually intended to mean ‘who they imagine they are,’ ‘who they want to be,’” he said.

For Hoskins and the Liberals, “a sick crave, an idée fixe, an obsessive idea, a deeply entrenched delusion about the self replaces a patient’s objective reality.”

It follows that “the core identity or nature of the bigamist and polygamist, and of the homosexual attracted to minors ‘is’ ephebophile or pedophile, and these persons ‘have the right to be who they are,’” noted van den Aardweg.

“Mr. Hoskins’ argument therefore paves the way for Ontario’s future openness to the rights of the latter categories, which are also part of the anti-family, gay-and-gender ideology he serves so faithfully.”

But van den Aardweg puts WPATH among the “ideological normalizers of transgenderism,” the criteria of which “are arbitrary, subjective, and elastic and do nothing to contradict the truth that every individual surgery (plus the rest) remains a harmful mutilation.”

He says the desire to change genders is “rooted in gender malformation, trauma, and inferiority feelings about and rejection of one’s real sex.”

This “wish-fantasy grows to a delusion and becomes the predominant passion of the mind, tyrannizing the sufferer and his environment alike.”

Causal factors for the transgender compulsion “are similar to those in the childhood of the average homosexual,” he noted.

In the case of boys, that could be “de-masculinizing and feminizing factors, like too much maternal and too little paternal influences and failed adaptation to same-sex peers,” van den Aardweg noted. “Indeed, most male transsexuals are homosexual.”

Transgender individuals are “severely neurotic, sometimes borderline psychotic, and there are cases of demonic influences,” he contended.

And the “compulsive transgender crave, like many neurotic obsessions and immature passions, is resistant to change,” and “will be alive as long as the person is in the grip of his feelings of his gender-inferiority complex as a desperate wishful fantasy,” van den Aardweg said.

“It is not changed or satisfied by hormonal or surgical interventions.”

These may lead to an “initial euphoria,” but that will give way to “renewed dissatisfaction and restlessness, depression, failed relationships based on his fake-role, promiscuity, substance abuse, suicide attempts,” observed van den Aardweg.

“Fortunately, sometimes, after all this misery, he faces up to his reality and enters the hard way of fighting his illusion and identifying with his true self.”

But as for the Liberals’ plan, van den Aardweg says it amounts to this: “Don’t cure the sickness, mutilate the patient — and let the community pay the costs.”